The Protégé’s Progress Part 2

Well it has been a while since I last visited this project. I have been busy, busy, busy and my RC plane activities have been mostly concerned with learning and gathering information.

I feel that I am now ready to complete this project. My flying skills have improved and my building/repairing skills have come along nicely as well.

So, a couple of weeks ago I turned my attention back to The Protégé. I cleaned it thoroughly, took it apart as much as I could and rebuilt it. I patched the various holes in the covering. Finally, I could not put off the tail section repair any longer.

I had plenty of advice, some of it detailed in earlier pages. In the end, I went for the approach of creating a repair that as closely matched the original construction as I could manage.

I attached a chunk of balsa to replace the rearward tab. I sanded it down until it located the stabilister proerly into the fuselage. Then I replaced the other tab at the front being careful to align it so that it was a snug fit. The next step was to re-attach the lower part of the stabiliser which projects down into the slot at the back of the fuselage. This was tricky because I had to repair the rudder hinge involved and re-insert and fix it at the same time as lining up the extension. I did okay. Here’s how it looks now:

Whilst working on the tail section I noticed that the hinges on one side of the elevator were damaged, one of them was ripped out. I am going to repair that now and will update later.